Amidst the graphic climax of Gerhart Hauptmanns well-known novella
Bahnwarter Thiel (1888), during which the title character's young
son is crushed to death by the Silesian express train, the attentive
reader is presented with a curious detail. A hat, more specifically a
fez, rests atop the head of a travelling salesman who has joined his
fellow passengers in surveying the horrific scene. This exotic
accessory, out of place amid the Waldeinsamkeit of the novella's
stately Brandenburg forests, has been, understandably, overlooked as a
minor detail in a scene that in its grisly nature and real-time
Sekundenstil narration already threatens the reader with sensory
overload. In terms of narrative significance, the novella certainly
offers content more compelling than what appears to be a trivial fashion
statement. Scholars evidently agree, for Hauptmann's tragic tale of
a downtrodden railway worker and the events leading to his mental
breakdown and subsequent institutionalization has attracted a rather
narrow set of inquiries. With a few notable exceptions, scholars have
remained focused on limited aspects of the novella, foremost among them
the bleak, deterministic trajectory of Thiel's mental decline,
metaphorically illustrated by the train's undeviating course and
juxtaposed against its unfeeling machinery. (1) One can hardly fault
readers for this focus on modernization and its concomitant woes: not
only does the name of the novella's title character--not to mention
the title itself--suggest the centrality of the railway to the
narrative, but the sheer horror of the train accident overshadows other
plot details. Furthermore, Hauptmann's subsequent and more
prominent dramas, such as Vor Sonnenaufgang (1889) and Die Weber (1892),
have attuned scholars to the social commentary embedded in Bahnwarter
Thiel, leading them to view the novella, as Klaus D. Post does,
"als Vorspiel zu einer neuen revolutionaren Arbeiterliteratur"
(54). At the very least, Peter Sprengel's characterization of
Bahnwarter Thiel as a "psychologische Krankengeschichte, die auch
die Schaden der Modernisierung reflektiert," summarizes a scholarly
consensus that technological progress is implicated in, or at least
symbolically linked with, Thiel's mental deterioration (Gerhart
Hauptmann 136).

But what of the hat? The narrative punch of the aforementioned
collision, together with the accessibility of the train metaphor, has
obscured more subtle and yet equally compelling ways in which one might
situate this novella in the imperial context signified by the fez. If
Hauptmann is truly a "seismograph of his time," as Ralph
Fiedler once avowed, we are due to revisit the novella for broader
insights into its Imperial German backdrop than what heretofore have
been offered. (2) In particular, I would like to fill in at least part
of this scholarly oversight by prying more thoroughly into how the
novella fits into Germany's self-identification as a colonial power
at the end of the century. In light of the broader historical context of
Bahnwarter Thiel, as well as Hauptmann's anthropologically flavored
descriptions of his characters and their surroundings, the novella is
due for a thicker reading, one that is mindful of what H. Glenn Penny
has identified as nineteenth-century Germany's collective and
entrenched ethnographic curiosity. (3) Thiel's conspicuous physical
appearance, coupled with the novella's geographically detached
setting, brings to mind the period's discourse on colonial spaces
and their perceived primitive inhabitants. Might Hauptmann--consciously
or not--have approached the novella from the vantage point of de facto
colonist? Indeed, his original title for the work--Im
Waldwinkel--betrays the fact that Hauptmann intended at least initially
to foreground the remoteness of its Spreewald setting. Its intermediate
title also retained part of this regionally-bound character: it first
appeared in the journal Die Gesellschaft with the subtitle
novellistische Studie aus dem markischen Kiefernforst.

The following inquiry teases out Hauptmann's participation in
Germany's ethnographically infused mindset in the age of
Imperialism. In revisiting how Germans engaged with their newfound
colonial identity in ways that reached beyond the acquisition of
territory and commodities, we might consider the extent to which an
imperial awareness was relevant in the novella's unlikely setting
merely a stone's throw from the nation's capital. An
ethnographically oriented reading of Bahnwarter Thiel shows that
Hauptmann situates the German region vis-a-vis the larger world, not in
the conciliatory "nation of provincials" paradigm that has
otherwise provided rich insight into the harmonic coexistence at this
time between the German national idea and its composite regions, but
rather in a detached portrayal that foregrounds the region's
geographic and cultural isolation. (4) Furthermore, given
Hauptmann's eventual associations with Social Darwinism, as well
colonialism's reinforcement of the idea of racial and class
hierarchy, I would like to suggest that the ethnographically colored
depictions of the novella's events and figures, while displaying
some of Hauptmann's characteristic insight into the plights of the
working-class, not only situate the novella solidly in its Imperial
context, but depict Germany's composite parts and constituents in a
way that calls into question the nation's political and cultural
dominance.

1. A Domestic Noble Savage

Superficially, there is little reason to connect Hauptmann to what
Volker Langbehn calls Germany's "Imperial consciousness"
at this time (9). His oeuvre does not point directly to an engagement
with colonial issues, nor did his travels extend to any of the
country's new colonial acquisitions. To be sure, Hauptmann cites in
his memoirs a typical childhood fascination at that time with Robinson
Crusoe and Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, but his own literary
subject matter remains confined primarily to Germany (7: 495).
Nevertheless, it is hard to overlook the fact that Hauptmanns early
productive period coincided with Germany's imperial expansion: the
Berlin Conference of 1884-85, which marked the official beginning of
Bismarck's entry into the colonial race, took place just two years
before Bahnwarter Thiel was written. The resulting surge of ethnographic
curiosity and nascent self-awareness as an imperial power--what Penny
has termed "worldly provincialism"--permeated even the far
corners of German society. Fixated as Hauptmann's works are on
domestic issues, therefore, it seems somewhat confining to isolate even
the decidedly non-cosmopolitan working-class milieu of his works from
the ethnographically aware environment of the time.

As evinced in the period's popular media, Germans'
collective keen interest in their overseas colonies stemmed not only
from pride in the nation's imperial clout, but from a racist
fascination with these new colonial subjects. Kirsten Belgum's
study of the widely-read Gartenlaube serial as an insight into German
national identity is helpful here, not only in contextualizing the
overlooked ethnographic slant of the novella, but also in pointing out
the overt racism that accompanied Germans'interest in the
nation's colonial holdings. Even as the magazine pursued an
educational mission to promote Germany's colonial program by
familiarizing its readers with overseas acquisitions, its illustrations
and articles often fore-grounded and sensationalized the physical
characteristics and savagery of colonial subjects (152-158). Revealing a
similar case of anthropological curiosity giving way to racism,
Penny's research on the period's burgeoning ethnographic
museums shows that despite academic or nationally oriented intentions,
museum displays of overseas cultures were often reduced to spectacle
(163).

Given this pervasive--and racially tinged--imperial consciousness,
it is easy to identify in the novella's main character numerous
stereotypes associated with what at the time were considered
"primitive" colonial subjects, especially those from
Germany's acquisitions in Africa. Most strikingly, Thiel's
hulking build immediately marks him as different. His sinewy arms and
"kindgutes, nachgiebiges Wesen," as well as his intellectual
shortcomings, lethargic nature, and curious, fetish-like collection of
objects, call to mind stereotypes of simple, superstitious,
pre-industrial natives (6:39). Furthermore, Hauptmann's
juxtaposition of Thiel's improbable attempts at a refined
appearance draws attention to the gulf between the civilized ideal and
his true primitive nature. The contrasts are striking: his red hair, in
literature historically a marker for abnormality or malevolence, is
"militarisch gescheitelt," and his clean Sunday suit with its
brightly polished buttons, outfits a "breiten, behaarten
Nacken" (6:37). In her summary of scholarly assessments of Thiel,
Robin A. Clouser calls to mind stereotypes commonly ascribed to the
colonial subject at that time: "many critics berate Thiel as a
bestial subhuman with whose physical drives and mental weaknesses they
could not possibly have anything in common" (107).s In an even more
blunt assessment, Fritz Martini writes that Thiel exists in
"dumpfer Primitivitat," a dismissive appraisal that is
evocative of the period's racially motivated depictions of
Germany's colonial subjects (91). Whether Hauptmann intended with
Thiel directly to reference these stereotypes, readers at the time,
already primed by the prevalence of these themes in popular and print
media, undoubtedly were attuned to imagery presented in his depictions
of this Spreewald "native."

As a counterpoint to these insinuations of Thiel's
borderline-domesticated status, however, Sprengel reminds us that Thiel
in fact ably performs a job that requires the characteristic Prussian
virtues of "Punktlichkeit und Achtsamkeit" (Gerhart Hauptmann
189). Furthermore, his strict adherence to routine, such as his
steadfast weekly church attendance and obsessive organization of his
material possessions shows that these are not difficult virtues for
Thiel to embody. Nevertheless, the indications from the novella's
outset of Thiel's potential for violence suggest that
Hauptmann's primary intent was not to emphasize Thiel's
adherence to these exacting expectations of a regimented society, but
rather to juxtapose them with his darker side. Indeed, even
Sprengel's own wording of "[d]ie preussischen Tugenden des
Wahnsinnstaters" underscores the coexistence in Thiel of
domesticity and savagery (Gerhart Hauptmann 189).

Even within his insular community, Thiel stands alone.
Hauptmann's repeated use of "die Leute" in his references
to the other villagers singles him out from the rest of the community
(6: 37, 38, 39, 44). It is notable that Hauptmann makes no mention of
Thiel's extended family. This omission maybe nothing more than a
plot device: the primary reason for his remarriage upon the death of his
first wife is due to the urgent need for a caretaker for his infant son.
Given the lack of geographic mobility of the lower classes, however, the
absence of family members in this small village is curious. Adding to
this sense of disenfranchisement, Hauptmann uses words that signify
perception rather than intimate knowledge. Verbs such as
"wahrnehmen," and "versichern," express the
villagers' dependence on outward registers of emotion and,
therefore, their failure to recognize his suppressed grief upon the
death of his first wife, as well as their initial approval of his new
wife as "ausserlich" (6:38). In his attempt to situate the
novella within the transitional period between realism and naturalism,
Ingo Stockmann sees this lack of specificity as the mark of an
unreliable narrator, a harbinger of the modern German narrative
(Naturalismus 159-60). I suggest--while not necessarily at odds with
this observation--that Hauptmann's attempt to create a sense of
alienation extends beyond the tensions between the objective world and
narrative voice; indeed, by withholding from the reader intimate
background knowledge about the main character, he both distances the
reader from Thiel and underscores his own marginalized status within the
novella's fictional community.

While Thiel's sheer physical difference is enough to create an
imagined threat, Hauptmann addresses genuine fears at this time of the
potential for violence associated with this character's massive
size. In the last half of the nineteenth century, Rousseau's
'noble savage' myth lost footing to the new idea of
yet-to-be-colonized man who was not merely undomesticated, but in his
potential for violence more urgently in need of European domination. In
a study of French popular and academic media in the last third of the
century, Blanchard et al. note the emphasis on the perceived violent
tendencies of the colonial subject: "[t]heir vocabulary stigmatized
savagery ... and was reinforced by an iconographic production of
unprecedented violence, giving credit to the concept of a stagnant
sub-humanity that was to be found at the furthermost boundaries of
empire, existing on the margin between the human and the animal"
(107). In doing so, Blanchard draws on stereotypes about the perceived
inherent violence of primitive man, and, by extension, the latent
potential of the working class--the savage's European
counterpart--for rebellion. And although Thiel attempts to repress his
own violent urges upon witnessing her verbally and physically abuse his
son, a reaction most readily seen in the "Krampf, der die Muskeln
schwellen machte und die Finger der Hand zur Faust zusammenzog,"
his violence is eventually and explosively released in the novel's
final pages when he brutally murders both his wife and infant son
(6:46).

2. Darkest Brandenburg

The novella's Spreewald setting, while less immediately
striking than Thiel's imposing figure, also reinforces a clear
distinction between dominant center and inferior periphery. To begin
with, it is helpful to recall that the setting of Bahnwarter Thiel has a
connection to a longer history of German colonization. Both the village
of Neu-Zittau, where Thiel attends church, and Schon-Schornstein, the
"Kolonie an der Spree" where he lives, were, despite their
proximity to the Prussian capital, regarded as colonial outposts, an
identity that stemmed not only from their location near the Polish
border, but also from the fact that they had been founded only a century
earlier as part of Frederick the Great's plan to surround Berlin
with agriculturally productive villages (6:36). Readers familiar with
Hauptmann's socially critical body of work might read the name of
the latter village as an ironic commentary on the tendency of industry
to mar the natural landscape, but it in fact traces its origins to a
sixteenth-century fishing settlement, as a district of the town of
Erkner, where Hauptmann lived from 1885 to 1889 to escape the Berlin
city air that ailed his lungs. Its location near the Spree, Oder, Havel,
and Elbe, as well as its surrounding natural resources of coal and
limestone, made the village a natural hub for barge traffic as a rapidly
expanding Berlin required increasing amounts of raw materials. With the
advent of the railway, this mode of transportation eventually dominated,
and the Berlin-Frankfurt an der Oder train line mentioned in the novella
was completed in 1848. Although by Hauptmann's time the village had
grown into a suburb--a streetcar line to Berlin had begun in 1882, and
its population numbered over fifteen hundred residents in 1885--its
rural character still prevailed (Sprengel, Gerhart Hauptmann 117-18).

Despite the area's history as a strategic outpost, first as a
buffer against what Frederick the Great saw as the Slavic hordes from
the East, and then as a hub for the transport of raw materials from the
outlying provinces to Berlin, Hauptmann takes pains in Bahnwarter Thiel
to present the area as remote and, despite its history as a regional
transportation hub and its proximity to Berlin, detached from the body
politic. His description in the novella of the Silesian express train
that passes through without stopping underscores the insignificance of
the town and situates it into empty space. Hauptmann clearly wishes to
preserve this awareness of the village's location on the margins,
repeatedly referring to it not as a "Dorf" but rather a
"Kolonie," and indirectly mentions its origins as a fishing
colony when he describes its composition of "etwa zwanzig
Fischer[n] und Waldarbeitern]" (6:36, 45, 65). The village is
described in a pre-industrial configuration, with almost every character
described according to their pre-industrial profession: Bahnwarter,
Pfarrer, Kuhmagd, Fischer, Waldarbeiter. This impersonal nomenclature
also distances the reader from the village: aside from Thiel's
immediate family, no characters are identified by name.

Hauptmann's desire to foreground the remoteness of
Thiel's surroundings might explain his silence in the novella on
the other industry of the region. This omission certainly was not due to
lack of source material: its location on the train line made Erkner a
strategic location for industry, notably Germany's first major coal
tar distillation facility founded by industrial pioneer Julius Rutgers
in 1861/62. In his memoirs Hauptmann writes of his acquaintance with
workers from "einer nahen chemischen Fabrik" that was in all
likelihood the Rutgers plant (7:1043). Even more noteworthy in the
context of the novella is the fact that the primary application for coal
tar at that time--and indeed the primary product of the Erkner
facility--was creosote for railway ties. As a novella, Bahnwarter Thiel
was not intended as a sweeping panorama of the area; given the
provincial flavor of the novella's original titles, however, one
cannot help wonder if Hauptmann might have intended with this omission
to understate the area's involvement in Germany's larger
economic and technological developments, further heightening the
perception of the region as a backwater satellite.

Hauptmann writes of being struck by the region's cultural
isolation, explaining his discovery that even a stone's throw from
Berlin the residents of these Spreewald villages appear to have
experienced none of the political and social changes of the nineteenth
century. "Dass es ein geeinigtes Deutschland gab," he observes
of the villagers' disenfranchisement with the larger Germany even
after the collective euphoria following unification in 1871,
"wussten sie nicht. Davon, dass ein Konigreich Sachsen, ein
Konigreich Bayern, ein Konigreich Wurttemberg bestand, hatten sie nicht
gehort. Es gab einen Kaiser in Berlin: viele wussten noch nichts
davon" (7: 1043). As he writes of his close interactions with the
rural residents, Hauptmann's engagement with the area is
reminiscent of anthropological fieldwork: "Ich machte mich mit den
kleinen Leuten bekannt," he writes, "Forstern, Fischern,
Katnerfamilien und Bahnwartern, betrachtete ich eine Waschfrau, ein
Spitallmutterchen eingehend und mit der gleichen Liebe, als wenn sie
eine Tragerin von Szepter und Krone gewesen ware" (7: 1043). Such
intimate and sympathetic portrayals are worlds apart from his detached
descriptions of Thiel and his life of drudgery; nevertheless, their
characterizations as "domestic natives" unaware of any
superimposed political structure lends an ethnographic depth to the
nation.

Depictions of rural settings and their homespun residents are
hardly new to German literature of the nineteenth century. Yet whereas
bucolic realist scenes were intended largely to familiarize Germans with
the country's composite regions, or, as famously illustrated in the
case of mid-century folklore scholar Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, identify in
the countryside the root of German character, Hauptmanns depictions of
rural Brandenburg foreground the area's detached, indeed foreign
nature. (6) Writing in his memoirs of their time spent in Erkner, he
describes himself and his wife as "entlegene Kolonisten,"
again drawing attention to the cultural gulf separating the region from
mainstream Germany (7:1027). Despite his self-proclaimed role as
"colonist," however, Hauptmann never presumes to take on a
civilizing role in his adopted region; rather, he writes of the
transformative, indeed, regressive, effect of the environment,
describing how both he and his wife were "instinktgemass zur Natur
zuruckgekehrt" (7:1028). He describes the primeval quality of the
Spreewald: "Die markische Erde nahm uns an, der markische
Kiefemforst nahm uns auf. Kanale, schwarz und ohne Bewegung, laufen
durch ihn hin, morastige Seen und grosse verlassene Tumpel unterbrechen
ihn, mit Schlangenhauten und Schlangen an ihren Ufern" (7:1027).
Scholars have drawn links to the Romantic qualities of what Hauptmann
himself refers to as the "markische Waldeinsamkeit" of the
forests as portrayed in Bahnwarter Thiel, and indeed the geographic
specificity of pine trees and woodpeckers leaves little doubt of the
novella's Central European setting; nevertheless, combined with
Hauptmanns own observations of the area, the region takes on a more
elemental nature: "Nein, hier war kein Breslau, kein Dresden, kein
Hamburg [...]. Es war grundlich Tabula rasa gemacht worden" (7:
1030, 1028). (7) Given the period's imperial context, this
Rousseauean description of the Brandenburg hinterlands offers a
striking, subversive counterpoint to the popular conception of imperial
dominance. Instead of presenting this area as an empty space awaiting
settlement, Hauptmann reports having experienced here the dissolution of
civilization: his admission of having adapted to--indeed having been
absorbed by--the region's land and forests, suggests the
destabilizing effect of this space. Moreover, the passage suggests that
there is more at stake here than merely a temporary reversion to nature:
Hauptmann's mention of the presence of snakes, black canals, and
morasses adds another, almost sinister, layer to his description. This
is not merely empty space awaiting settlement, but rather a desolate
state of wilderness that threatens not only to resist settlement, but
indeed to overcome the settler.

Hauptmann's apparent desire to dissociate Thiel and his
adopted village not only from greater Germany, but indeed from
historical time, can be explained in part with the help of Anne
McClintock's discussion of what she terms "the invention of
anachronistic space" (40). As she states in her study of British
imperialism in the Victorian age, "imperial progress across the
space of empire is figured as a journey backward in time to an
anachronistic moment of prehistory" (40). In other words, as the
colonist moves into the space to be colonized, he goes back in time. Not
even forty miles from the center of Berlin, Thiel's Spreewald
village serves as a reminder of how abruptly the center transforms to
the margins. Furthermore, McClintock explains how the conceptual
distance of marginal groups is linked to physical distance, as, among
others, "the colonized and the industrial working class are
disavowed and projected onto anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic
and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of
modernity" (40). Despite the role of the railway in the larger
spatial nexus--and indeed Thiel's occupational association with
this role--he and his village reveal no real adherence to the nation.

While the unfeeling machinery of the train plays its most insidious
role in the downfall of Thiel and his family, Hauptmann also hints at
the railroad as a contributing factor in the alienating distance between
center and periphery. To be sure, the railroad, as an actual mode of
travel, has historically been celebrated as a unifying force. However,
the train can become an agent of anonymity, rupturing the very community
it purports to serve. Wolfgang Schivelbusch explains how train
travel--in particular, the distortion and sensory overload resulting
from the combination of high velocity and limited viewing angle--changes
not only one's view, but one's deeper connection to the
landscape and its occupants: "[t]he depth perception of
preindustrial consciousness," he explains, "is literally lost:
velocity blurs all foreground objects, which means that there is no
longer a foreground--exactly the range in which most of the experience
of preindustrial travel was located" (98). With the disappearance
of the foreground, the traveler is removed from the inhabited space of
the landscape, losing not only visual acuity, but the accompanying
deeper knowledge of--and identification with--the surroundings as well.
Residents of the surrounding countryside become spectacle, and regions,
such as the outlying Brandenburg landscape in the novella, become empty
space between larger hubs. Even when the train makes an unscheduled stop
after the accident, allowing the passengers more closely to interact
with the family, their unfamiliarity with Thiel's domestic
situation leads them, ironically, to sympathize only with the negligent
Lene.

Here the train passenger's aforementioned fez comes into play.
The traveler's exotic fashion illustrates what Jeff Bowersox refers
to as Germany's "mass colonial culture" that permeated
the nation at this time (8). Thiel's observation of the train adds
a curious note to this idea of a peripheral colonial theme in the
novella: his sudden awareness that the trains hold occupants underscores
not only Thiel's disenfranchisement from the technology that has
been his livelihood, but also his inability to process intellectually
the modernizing world of which he, as a railway worker, is an agent. His
observation--"Er hat sich nie um den Inhalt dieser Polterkasten
gekummert"--suggests an aboriginal mindset on Thiel's part, or
at the very least uncovers a rift between his daily life and his larger
community.

3. A Bourgeois Counterpart Fasching (1887)

Given Thiel's working-class status and presumed accompanying
lack of bourgeois self-regulation, it might be tempting simply to
attribute his tragic outcome to social rank--as a lesser citizen more
susceptible than the robust middle class to the destabilizing forces of
the periphery. Hauptmann, however, does not neatly allocate the
"primitive" flaws of his peripheral colonial subjects to a
single class. Certainly Thiel's explosive and tragic outburst after
a lifetime of repression at the novella's end can be seen as a
warning of latent proletarian violence, but a parallel work suggests
that even Germany's outwardly steadfast middle class is also
susceptible to the entropic forces of this marginal space. A striking
complement to Bahnwarter Thiel, yet one that has received little
scholarly attention--and similarly limited acknowledgement from the
author himself--is the novella Fasching, Hauptmann's earliest
published prose narrative. (8) First appearing in the literary journal
Siegfried in (1887), Fasching was written within months of his
better-known novella, and, like Bahnwarter Thiel, was intended as a
brief character study. (9) Given their near-concurrent appearances as
well as their adjacent settings in small Brandenburg villages, a
comparative reading of the two novellas helps address whether
Hauptmann's alienating depiction of Thiel and his surroundings is
attributed primarily to that character's primitive and decidedly
unfortunate circumstances. At first glance, the flawed main character of
Fasching, despite his initial appearance as a German everyman,
complicates the notion that Thiel's downfall is linked to his
foreignness.

Initially, the main character of Fasching could not be more
different from the downtrodden protagonist of Bahnwarter Thiel.
Segelmacher Kielblock--note the same pre-industrial "profession +
name" designation--comes across as Thiel's prosperous
counterpart. Whereas there are clear signs of Thiel's financial
insecurity--the free use of a plot of land for growing potatoes appears
to be a significant windfall for the family--Kielblock's life is
the picture of petty bourgeois prosperity: the narrator inventories
among his possessions "ein hubsches Eigentum am See, Hauschen, Hof,
Garten, und etwas Land," in addition to a cow, pigs, and numerous
fowl (6:15). Kielblock's personality reflects his good fortune.
Married only one year, he smugly sees himself as proof that marriage
need not mark the end of youthful frivolity: "der ist ein
Narr," he boasts with self-satisfaction, "der in die Ehe geht
wie in ein Kloster ... bei uns geht das lustige Leben jetzt erst recht
an" (6:15). Even the birth of their son does little to hinder the
couple's self-indulgent lifestyle, thanks to the presence in their
household of Kielblock's mother, who fills in as caretaker. In
contrast to Thiel's life of routine and drudgery, Kielblock
emanates a boozy hedonism: "Der Winter," the narrator
describes Kielblock's robust good cheer, "war seine liebste
Jahreszeit. Schnee erinnerte ihn an Zucker, dieser an Grog" (6:16).
Furthermore, while Thiel is trapped in a "Netz wie Eisen" both
by his wife's domination and his lack of upward mobility, Kielblock
appears to be the agent of his own fate--in no small part due to what
initially appears to be a solid bourgeois work ethic: "Es wurde
verfehlt sein," the narrator cautions us against misjudging the
sail-maker, "Herrn Kielblock schlechtweg fur einen Faulenzer von
Profession zu halten, im Gegenteil, kein Mensch konnte fleissiger
arbeiten als er, solange es Arbeit gab" (6:47, 16). Whereas Thiel
appears aben in both looks and spirit, Kielblock's penchant for
hard work and Lebensfreude makes him, at least initially, the bourgeois
everyman.

Yet precisely Kielblock's "work hard, play hard"
mentality sets him apart from his industrious bourgeois predecessors. In
contrast to Gustav Freytag's bourgeois dictum that a duty-bound
work ethic lies at the core of the German people, the narrator suggests
that work to Kielblock has little virtue in itself; rather, it is merely
the means to an indulgent end. (10) As he proudly assesses his home at
the novella's outset, work to him contributes not to German
national pride or economic contribution, but to his stomach: the
narrator cartoonishly describes how Kielblock sees his livestock as
walking sausages and roasts. And while the reader might overlook this
love of food and drink as familiar and benign vices, Kielblock's
misplaced love of money is harder to overlook, especially in comparison
to Thiel's own selfless attempt to amass a small savings for his
son's future. The narrator explains that Kielblock regularly gives
the mother a coin to add to her chest of money, but what the old woman
sees as a pension, Kielblock and his wife regard as a deposit to be
redeemed upon her death. "Die Mutter ist eine gute
Sparbuchse," Kielblock proudly tells his wife as they greedily plan
how to spend the money, upon which the two initiate a jolly impromptu
dance (6:17).The narrator's irony is hardly subtle when he predicts
that the opening of the chest upon her death will be the "Hohepunkt
seines Lebens" (6:20).

The novella's plot reads like a cautionary tale against
intemperance. A winter hill of festivities already behind them,
Kielblock and his wife merrily set out to a village Fasching party,
angering a potential client by foregoing work to do so. They bring along
their one-year-old son, because the grandmother recently has been
debilitated by a stroke, and is therefore no longer able to care for
him. As a condemning insight into the couple's character, the
narrator describes how they leave the infirm old woman in her chair next
to a plate of food, with plans to return to her and the family dog the
next morning. At the party, Kielblock is beside himself with glee, due
not only to his hearty intake of alcohol, but also to his delight at the
partygoers' horrified reactions to his costume: a
"Halsabschneider"--a chilling detail given the fate of
Thiel's family (6:21). After celebrating until dawn, Kielblock
makes plans for the following Sunday: first to enjoy a leisurely walk
through the forest with friends--as well as a few bottles of Cognac--and
later, to visit family on the other side of the iced-over lake. Upon
their return home that night, Kielblock's dual vices of indulgence
and greed join to bring about a tragic end: as the family makes its way
home across the lake, the guiding light from the grandmother's
lantern in the window on the opposite shore suddenly vanishes. After
several agonizing pages in which the family wanders aimlessly in the
moonless night, they eventually fall through the ice and drown. In a
final ironic detail, the neighbors find the grandmother asleep the next
morning, mid-count at her chest of coins: the lamp, which she had taken
from the window so that she could count her money, is still emitting a
weak light.

The above plot summary already reveals several similarities between
Bahnwarter Thiel and Fasching, most strikingly the ironic link between
the protagonists' professions and their subsequent downfall:
Thiel's son is killed by one of the trains in his charge, and
Kielblock, whose livelihood depended on his proximity to the lake,
drowns. Tragically, the events of the latter novella are not fictional:
on 13 February 1887, the shipbuilder Eduard Zieb, together with his wife
and young son, drowned while attempting to cross the iced-over Flakensee
near Erkner (Pfeiffer-Voigt 26). There are no factual roots for
Thiel's story aside from Hauptmann's mention in his memoirs of
interactions with the region's railway workers, but the
author's plot sketches clearly denote his intention to spotlight a
single tragedy in each novella: the notes for Bahnwarter Thiel refer to
a "Bahnwarter uberfahrenes Kind," and Fasching simply reads
"ertrunken" (Sprengel, Gerhart Hauptmann 132).

4. Ethnography and Social Darwinism

Given Hauptmann's colonially reminiscent depictions of
Germany's geographical and social margins, what conclusions can be
drawn about the effects of imperial culture on the literature of the
period? Certainly their ethnographically thick depictions of Germans in
their rural setting are in themselves not enough to differentiate
Bahnwarter Thiel and Fasching from their regionally bound predecessors;
in particular, the Dorfgeschichte a half-century earlier had already
established the literary foregrounding of rustic spaces and their
residents. Yet the conspicuous distinction between the regional idyll
and wholesome residents of that genre and the remote setting, between
the alienating characters and deterministic outcomes of Hauptmann's
novellas, suggests that his historical moment had introduced a new layer
of complexities to the perception of Germany's social and
geographical differences.

As naturalistic studies, both novellas might most readily be
characterized as detached narratives of tragic events in the lives of
insignificant people, what Hilscher calls a "zeitgemasse Wiedergabe
eines tragischen Kleine-Leute-Schicksals" (88). While this claim to
naturalistic adherence is true in the main, it would be more helpful in
situating the works in their imperial context--and remaining more
faithful to Hauptmann's refusal to align himself with a single
literary movement--not merely to identify the various
"naturalistic" features of each work, but also to consider the
specific ways in which the colonial experience influenced German
self-perception at home. Specifically, Imperial Germany's
ethnographic awareness helped develop the ideas of Social Darwinism and
determinism that are typical features of this literary movement. In
other words, I suggest more explicitly to attribute these typical
"naturalistic" features of Hauptmann's novellas to the
colonial experience and its accompanying hierarchical view of race and
ethnicity.

While the remote settings of these novellas did not make them
colonies in the political sense, their proximity to the East nonetheless
enabled Hauptmann to draw from imperial imagery in his depictions.
Although Germany's larger history of territorial annexations as the
country pieced itself together en route to unification meant that a
context of "interior colonization" had been established long
before Hauptmann's time, the connection between geography, race,
and sociocultural evolution did not come into play until Germany entered
the colonial race. Looking back to the beginning of the nineteenth
century, for example, Marcus Twellmann has observed how in the
Biedermeier period, newly annexed territories such as Westphalia served
as proxies for the overseas colonies that Germany did not yet possess
(59). As opposed to imperial-era colonies, however, these ethnic German
acquisitions did not carry the negative, racially based stereotypes that
were ascribed to more recent colonial subjects.

With their proximity to Poland, Hauptmann's eastern
Brandenburg settings straddled a middle ground between civilization and
wilderness, making his protagonists more susceptible to disorder. With
this state of "domestic wilderness" in mind, Elizabeth
Edwards's observations on how the period's colonial
stereotypes could be extended to Europeans is helpful in explaining how
Hauptmann transferred this negative colonial imagery onto his
characters. As she explains of non-European races that were perceived to
be "inferior" and therefore doomed to extinction, difference
was not determined by race alone: "[t]he Other," she writes,
"was not merely racially other, but, by implication, culturally and
morally other" (140). The heightened awareness of race ushered in
by colonialism led to new modes of social classification, as lower
classes were described as distinct "races" rather than social
groups. Bernhard Kleeberg notes, for example, how policy makers compared
working-class slums of Victorian England to African colonies, and
observed that its occupants were in need of "colonization" by
the educated middle classes (35). He draws attention to the title of a
social program from 1890: "In Darkest England and the Way
Out," an obvious reference to Henry Morton Stanley's famous
"Darkest Africa," chronicling his trip into the Congo (35). As
I suggest earlier in this inquiry, Thiel's outward appearance
clearly marks him as Other; his suppressed violent nature, too, both
points to an uncompleted evolutionary state and hints at the shared
potential for rebellion between the working class and colonial subjects.

Kielblock, too, despite his higher social status, follows his own
set of "primitive" urges. Readers familiar with Vor
Sonnenaufgang will be attuned to the character's functional
alcoholism, one of many examples of urge fulfillment that we see in him.
While as a skilled craftsman Kielblock appears to enjoy relative
occupational freedom--indeed, intent on clear demarcation between work
and leisure, he turns away a weekend customer on the eve of the fateful
party--the miserly intensity with which his mother guards her chest of
coins suggests that the family's greedy urges have not been
tempered by the constraints of civilization. Less obvious, but as
insidious and inescapable as Thiel's mental shortcomings,
Kielblock's moral weakness point to the destabilizing threat of his
proximity to the "Wild East." (12)

The women, too, factor into the idea of an arrested evolutionary
development. Their borderline civilized status is hard to overlook: with
her "brutale Leidenschaftlichkeit," Lene possesses what at the
time was regarded as the 'primitive' sexual appetite of the
African female, a "wild woman" whose urges must be
domesticated (6:38). And while Kielblock's wife shows no signs of
Lene's brutal rebelliousness, she, too, illustrates what at the
time were imperial perceptions of African women as a "living
archive of the primitive archaic" (41). Although their
circumstances are infinitely more civilized than those of Thiel's
family, the interaction between Kielblock's wife and infant son is
more instinctive than consciously nurturing: as she breastfeeds him
between dances at a party, the coarse description of the pair
contradicts the civilized picture of bourgeois propriety: "Hier,
auf der Treppe sitzend oder wo wie sonst Raum fand, reichte sie dem
Kleinen die vom Trinken und Tanzen erhitzte, keuchende Brust, die es
gierig leer sog" (6:16). As Post has suggested, the satiated
child's "totenahnliche[r], bleiernde[r]" sleep after
suckling in such a greedy manner suggests that like his father, he
carries a predisposition for self-gratification. Alternatively, the
vivid depiction of the child's voracious appetite mirrors his
father's gluttony, drawing attention to how even in adulthood,
Kielblock continues to house primitive urges.

In light of the chauvinistic cultural attitudes of Imperial Europe,
these racially suggestive and Darwinistic views of the Other are hardly
surprising; more puzzling, however, is Hauptmann's extension of
this imagery onto German subject matter. With Germany eager to represent
itself as the agent of social and political order, why would the author
insinuate in his ethnic German protagonists a lesser degree of
civilization? Certainly proximity to the Polish "frontier"
enabled Hauptmann to depict his Brandenburg settings as more susceptible
to the perceived disorder of the East; given the desire of imperial
powers at this time to define themselves against their colonial
subjects, however, one might more logically have expected him to
showcase the triumph of civilization rather than its limitations.

Addressing this apparent inconsistency might help to stitch
together Hauptmann's outwardly conflicting representations of his
eastern settings. Their proximity to Berlin, in addition to their
importance as suppliers of raw materials to the Prussian capital lends
his settings and subject matter an economic and politically strategic
significance; their location near the Polish frontier, on the other
hand, marginalizes them. Furthermore, Hauptmann assigned each of his
doomed protagonists a career--railway and shipbuilding--that was
critical to the national infrastructure. It is tempting to interpret
these opposing positions of centrality and periphery as a cautionary
tale: with intervention by means of increased superimposition of
national infrastructure into these regions--Bismarck's glut of
social and domestic policies during the 1880s comes to mind--the two
protagonists might have been exposed to enough administrative oversight
to spare them their fates. Given Hauptmann's tendency, however, to
foreground social issues over national ones, overemphasizing the
political motivations of these works risks mischaracterizing his
intentions.

What, then, might we ultimately conclude from Hauptmann's
efforts to marginalize and alienate part of Germany precisely as the
nation was asserting itself as an agent of civilization? Rather than
deem Hauptmann a proponent of the progress that may have changed the
course of his protagonists' lives, I suggest that we view his use
of imperial imagery as a counterpoint to the nations arrogant
self-perception at century's end. Indeed, while the imperial
mindset reinforced cultural boundaries by conceptually separating German
culture from the non-German Other, Hauptmann's colonially
reminiscent depicitions of his eastern characters downplay the
distinctions between Germans and their colonial subjects. Furthermore,
in highlighting the primitive tendencies of both men and their families,
regardless of social class and "Germanness," he subverts the
power of national belonging and class. What appear to be isolated case
studies of tragic lives in fact indicate a refusal on Hauptmann's
part to place Germany neatly one on side of the civilized-uncivilized
spectrum, and reveal a view of German imperial endeavors that was at
best sobering.

(4) See also Confino, who like Applegate, offers compelling
evidence for how regional identity in the last half of the nineteenth
century functioned as a metonym for the larger nation.

(5) By characterizing Thiel as "a modern Hercules,"
Clouser deviates from the standard Darwinian interpretations of
Thiel's character, and instead insinuates him into classical
mythology. Yet while this designation elevates Thiel in comparison to
other readings, Clouser emphasizes that the comparison is due not to any
superhuman characteristics, but rather to his flaws as "a modern
strong man who fails to be a hero" (98).

(8) Amid the scant scholarship on Fasching, Washington's
article stands out. Additionally, Post offers a brief thematic
comparison between this novella and Bahnwarter Thiel (65-68). The few
other inquiries into this novella include Eberhard Hilscher's brief
mention in his biography (86-89), and Maurer's short analysis and
assessment of the novella as a "somewhat contrived, melodramatic
tale of hubris and death" (Gerhart Hauptmann 13). Even
Sprengel's recent comprehensive biography devotes less than a
paragraph out of more than eight hundred pages to this novella (132).
Hauptmann himself, while citing Fasching as the starting point of his
literary ambitions, lists Bahnwarter Thiel as his first real literary
contribution (7,1044).

(9) Although Fasching appeared in print one year before Thiel
appeared in the journal Die Gesellschaft in 1888, the two novellas were
both written in 1887.

(11) In following the historical shift of this word, Kopp notes the
semantic breadth of the German--and English--term
"Kolonie"/"colony;" in particular, she distinguishes
the imperial understanding of this term with its implied imbalance of
power from the more neutral understanding of this term, which at its
most basic refers merely to a spatial offshoot from the body politic
(2-3).

(12) I thank Kristin Kopp for this term.

Works Cited

Applegate, Celia. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of
Heimat. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

Belgum, Kirsten. Popularizing the Nation. Audience, Representation,
and the Production of Identity in Die Gartenlaube, 1853-1900. Lincoln: U
of Nebraska P, 1998.